Elizabeth Warren just released "A Plan For Economic Patriotism." Here's how it starts:
I come from a patriotic family. All three of my brothers joined the military. And I’m deeply grateful for the opportunities America has given me. But the giant “American” corporations who control our economy don’t seem to feel the same way. They certainly don’t act like it.
Sure, these companies wave the flag — but they have no loyalty or allegiance to America. Levi’s is an iconic American brand, but the company operates only 2% of its factories here. Dixon Ticonderoga — maker of the famous №2 pencil — has “moved almost all of its pencil production to Mexico and China.” And General Electric recently shut down an industrial engine factory in Wisconsin and shipped the jobs to Canada. The list goes on and on.
U-S-A! U-S-A!
Sorry, I got caught up in the patriotic fervor.
So will this nationalist, anti-corporate rhetoric pull any Trump/Sanders voters over to her? I'm skeptical that it will, but we'll see how it plays out. (Tucker Carlson liked it, which is telling, although ultimately he seemed to conclude that it was not enough to get him in the Warren camp).
And will No. 2 pencils be made in the good ol' US of A again? I'm skeptical of that too, but I think the SATs will survive this.
In terms of the substance, she put forward in this piece a number of proposals related to manufacturing, and it sounds like maybe some more specific trade proposals are coming. While Trump emphasizes that the foreigners are cheating us, Warren seems to look admiringly at the industrial policy of other countries and wants to copy it. I'll come back to that some other time. For now, I wanted to focus on an institutional point she made:
- Consolidating existing government programs that affect job creation into a new agency with the sole responsibility to create and defend quality, sustainable American jobs. The new Department — the Department of Economic Development — will replace the Commerce Department, subsume other agencies like the Small Business Administration and the Patent and Trademark Office, and include research and development programs, worker training programs, and export and trade authorities like the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. The new Department will have a single goal: creating and defending good American jobs.
...
... there are some government agencies that undermine sustainable American jobs. For example, the Office of the United States Trade Representative — whose mission is to negotiate trade deals on behalf of America — is captured by the interests of corporate executives and lobbyists. Its actions across Administrations demonstrate a deep ideological opposition to anything that might put the interests of American workers above the interests of multinational corporations or Wall Street.
I don't doubt that the U.S. government is, to a great extent, captured by special interests -- corporate, labor union, various NGOs, lobbyists in general. But on what basis would someone say that USTR is more captured than others? And why would her Department of Economic Development be any different? If you are going to expand the role of government and have it spend more money, as she suggests in the piece, it's inevitable that the role of interest groups and lobbyists is going to increase. She spends a lot of the piece trying to sound anti-corporate, but I think that many big businesses are going to be pretty happy to have the federal government throwing more money around. This, for example, sounds like a special interest bonanza:
Our international competitors like China, Germany, and Japan develop concrete plans for promoting domestic industry and then make serious investments to achieve their goals. China’s Made in China 2025 plan aims to dominate advanced manufacturing in the coming decades using various incentives and “hundreds of billions of euros” in subsidies. Germany and Japan have also developed plans that identify long-term goals for domestic production and put real money behind achieving them.
This is a pretty straightforward idea. But outside of the defense context, the United States has nothing remotely like it.